Category Archives: Games

The time has finally come, its time to move on from Evony. I have really enjoyed playing this game with many of my real life friends and met a lot of new friends along the way. Our alliance FUBAR has really made a name for it self using a well defined mixture of co-ordination, hard work, spies and cleaver guerrilla tactics. The most fun challenge was to destroy the biggest back stabbing alliance on the server, LEGENDS. Very early on they were welcomed to our family of allies with open arms. The immature leadership found it amusing to declare war on us only to apologize for the attacks a few hours later. We presented them with forgiveness twice, but you know how the saying goes. “Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me” We weren’t going to let this happen again, so we embarked on a successful campaign to see their demise. In their death throws they managed to convince another one of our allies WDC to turn on us forming the alliance Nemesis.

All of FUBAR again answered the call of war and turned the Nemesis cities into firewood. While sending their cavalry off to the glue factory. Following this war came another war against a number of alliances that were so easily rolled over that its not even worth the time to mention them.

Why have I decided to move on ? The list is actually pretty long, but the most basic summary is. I am bored with the game and might as well call it quits before I end up hating the game. Who knows, in a few months I might come back. Which is why I have positioned my remaining city in such a way that a return would be very easy. I have grossly neglected a number of personal projects in the past few months, the time has come to jump in and finish them off.

What are my ending thoughts about Evony ? I honestly have to say that their customer service is hands down worse then Sony (Everquest). At least Sony answered requests and did bug fixes. There are countless bugs and problems with Evony that will never be fixed. The company is busy working on “Age 2” of the game, which is a whole new version of the game. However, it is very hard to trust a company with another game when they poorly support their existing products.

Lets face it, Evony has some very questionable advertising techniques. The banner ads entice you with large breasted woman that need to be saved in the game. Players very quickly realize that this content doesn’t exist in the game what so ever. You also very quickly realize that the company spams you constantly trying to encourage you to spend money on the game to quickly advance your empire. Yes, I did spend some money on the game. The amount of money I spent is equal to 2 of your average console games yet provided me with 3 times the amount of hours of entertainment. Do I regret it ? Absolutely not! Honestly, the spam is very annoying and turns a lot of players away. But, I am awesome at ignoring advertising in general. 🙂

I personally did not start playing the game from these ads. I started to play because some real life friends were playing. Let me tell you, the LAN parties have been a lot of fun!

Cheating is a tremendous problem with this game. The game mechanics force players with very large armies to either invest incredible amounts time farming or cheat to feed their armies. Some players take this cheating to the next level to automated their attacks and defenses. As it stands, taking a city from a player who is online is difficult. Trying to take a city from a bot is impossible. Sure, people cheat at all sorts of games and that is nothing new. Sadly, there is nothing that Evony can do to battle this outside of banning players. There is just no way to protect a flash game from automated actions. Yet surprisingly they don’t even take basic steps to encrypt their network stream, which leads to interesting programs used to SMS you of an incoming attack. Most top players use this types of applications and that prevents a legitimate player from climbing the ranks.

We are presently looking for a new game, something with far less of an upkeep time investment. Just something to hold us off for a few months until Starcraft 2 comes out. I have discussed it with all of my friends who play Evony and we all agreed that it will be our next major game.

I was playing around with multiple monitor support in X-Plane 8 on my Mac Pro and I have a few suggestions if you are having trouble getting this to work.

Inside System preferences -> Displays -> Arrangement make sure your menu bar is on your left most monitor.

All monitors need to have the same height resolution set. If you are using monitors that support different max resolutions, you should change all of them to match the lowest monitor resolution. When setting things up initially, you should set the width all the same as well, then tweak from there.

Add up all monitor widths and set your X-Plane resolution to that width. For example, during my testing I was using a 20″ Samsung, very very old Samsung 15″ and a Samsung 61″ HD DLP set. The max the 15″ could accept was 1024, so I set X-Plane to 3072×768. At that low of a height, the TV had large black bars around it … but it works for my needs.

When money gets better, I want to get another Samsung 20″ monitor … they aren’t too expensive and work fairly well. Then I will use my laptop for the other screen.

Totally unrelated to the above, but here was me flying a jet around tonight chasing this airliner 😀